Background: Marshall-Smith syndrome (MSS) is an infrequently described entity characterised by failure to thrive, developmental delay, abnormal bone maturation and a characteristic face. In studying the physical features of a group of patients, we noticed unusual behavioural traits. This urged us to study cognition, behavioural phenotype and…

Background: Our main purpose was to compare the lexical development of Spanish children with Down syndrome (DS) and children with typical development (TD) to investigate the relationship between cognitive and vocabulary development in comprehension and oral and gestural production. Method: Participants were 186 children with DS and 186 children…

The role of the imagination in adult thinking is to go beyond reality and to express generalised laws. The researcher's job is to specify the cultural tools that preschool children use in the development of their imagination. Previous research has identified two main stages in the development of imagination up until the age of six, a third stage…

Happe and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a "privileged domain" in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of…

To obtain reliable information, it is important to identify and effectively question knowledgeable informants. Two experiments examined how age and the ease of distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources influence children's ability to effectively question those sources to solve problems. A sample of 3- to 5-year-olds was introduced to…

A multitask battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months of age. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children's Elicited Imitation task performance and whether the patterns of association varied…

It is widely acknowledged that, across the United Kingdom and the USA, childcare practitioners often struggle with cases of child neglect, because of the difficulties involved in attempting to define the problem at hand, and balancing these cases with others in the caseload that may appear more pressing, such as physical abuse. Consequently, in an…

Emotional and cognitive changes that occur during adolescence set the stage for the development of adaptive or maladaptive beliefs about emotions. Although research suggests that parents' behaviors and beliefs about emotions relate to children's emotional abilities, few studies have looked at parental socialization of children's emotions,…

This study contributes to the investigation of the variability of the schooling effect on cognitive development between educational systems and its underlying factors, by focusing on 3 cases differing in the characteristics assumed to affect the magnitude of the schooling effect (the quality of the schooling and students' mean ability to benefit…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching a three-step cognitive strategy (TIP) using the schema broadening procedures on functional mathematical problem solving skills of young adults with intellectual disability (ID). We randomly assigned 14 learners with ID to the control and experimental group before the…

In the 2014 report, "Closing the Achievement Gap Through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten," researchers examined the impacts of "Tools of the Mind" on cognitive and academic…

The neurocognitive development of moral and conventional judgments was examined. Event-related potentials were recorded while 24 adolescents (13 years) and 30 young adults (20 years) read scenarios with 1 of 3 endings: moral violations, conventional violations, or neutral acts. Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable…

In this article I propose a method of selecting and assigning readings in the religious studies or theology classroom, such that these readings complicate one another, rather than standing in opposition or as simple alternatives. Such a strategy emulates key pedagogical insights of twelfth-century sentence collection, an activity at the very heart…

The psychology supporting the use of quantifier words (e.g., "some," "most," "more") is of interest to both scientists studying quantity representation (e.g., number, area) and to scientists and linguists studying the syntax and semantics of these terms. Understanding quantifiers requires both a mastery of the…

The emerging literature on embodied cognition highlights the role that the body plays in cognitive and affective processes. We investigated whether different body postures, specifically leaning postures thought to reflect different states of cognitive focus, can impact cognitive focus and task performance. In three experiments we confirmed that…